The predictable mantra has begun – “we have to maintain law and order.”
Calls for law and order in the midst of nation-wide demonstrations against police brutality and in favor of racial justice are as predictable as the sunset. It always happens.
Well timed calls for law and order always served the purposes of the powerful who pretend to care.
It is always the great “BUT” working to obscure the issue at hand; to distract from the problems of racial injustice and police violence.
Law and order is the subversive language deployed by people who are not at risk as they feign comradeship with those who are. It allows the bogus compatriot to say, in fact, “I am with you as long as you keep your objections within my boundaries of safety.”
When members of the establishment say things like, “I believe in peaceful protest, BUT…I believe in racial equality, BUT…I support the protests, BUT I condemn the looting…BUT we need to maintain law and order,” they merely repeat the establishment code for defending the status quo.
Defending law and order has always been the message of the establishment,
allowing it to maintain its mask of humanity while tacitly supporting acts of inhumanity.
We have seen it all before.
Law and order was the message of pro-segregationist governors and mayors in the deep south who believed that ANY expression of civil disobedience, no matter how peaceful, especially when committed by black people and other civil rights advocates, was a dangerous act of lawlessness demanding brutal, police suppression.
Lester Maddox, the racist, segregationist governor of Georgia, always insisted that he accepted black people as equals. He just didn’t want them living next door. And he would gladly sic the police on any black person who tried to move into his neighborhood. (Watch his racist confessions with Jim Brown on the Dick Cavett show here. I recall watching a different Cavett show where Maddox walked off the set).
It was also Richard Nixon’s Republican party code for keeping black people
in their place at the height of the civil rights movement in 1968. It was also a very successful code language that spoke volumes to conservative America and led to his presidential victory that year.
But every reactionary plea for “law and order” must first answer the question, “Whose law, and whose order?”
Because the fact is that, in America today, there are two difference types of law and order, one for white, middle/upper-class communities, and another for (poor) communities of color.
As the repeated, public murders of African-Americans demonstrate, law and order for black people in America is unlike law and order for white people. For African-Americans, law and order means (1) people of color are born guilty; they are always suspect, which means that (2) the police are free to treat them as they wish.
Law and order for black people in America includes breaking down their doors for no good reason; shooting them dead inside their own homes, even when police are at the wrong address; planting evidence while making
illegal arrests; and the list goes on.
That is the “law and order” enforced in America’s black neighborhoods today.
So, whose law and order are the public pearl-clutchers advocating and defending when they condemn protesters for violating the norms of “law and order”?
Where were these easy-street advocates of public order when black neighborhoods were being patrolled by cops who viewed community residents as the enemy to be controlled rather than as citizens to be protected and served?
Where were the white marches launched in defense of black communities when they needed defending against a local, militarized police force eagerly searching for excuses to deploy their new body armor, armored vehicles, stun guns, rubber bullets, 4-foot batons, rubber bullets and tear gas?
George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, and Ahmaud Arbery are only the tip of the iceberg.
Unarmed black people are 5x more likely to be shot and killed by police than
are white people in America. That shocking statistic alone tells us that murdering unarmed black people (although possessing a weapon is not a significant distinguishing factor) is completely acceptable and well within the bounds of American law and order.
Concerning the present protests, an overwhelming amount of video evidence proves that the police themselves regularly instigate violence where protesters were behaving peacefully.
The police are masters at escalating violence needlessly as an expression of their own presumption of authoritarian privilege. (Watch this compilation video of cops attacking peaceful demonstrators with impunity). I have personally experienced how the police use excessive force to instigate violence during an anti-war protest in Chicago in 2012. I then watched as the establishment media turned the facts upside down to accuse the demonstrators of attacking the police!
By condemning these calls for law and order, I am not condoning violence.
Rather, I am highlighting the fact that we must learn to insist and to resist.
First, we must insist that the public spot light remain focused on the central issues: racism and police brutality. We cannot be distracted.
Second, we must resist the power of corporate media to socialize us into (a) complacency and (b) collaboration. The problem being exposed by protesters right now is not some tendency for peaceful rallies to be exploited by chaotic troublemakers. Don’t allow the media to suggest otherwise.
The problem is white America’s sleepy indifference to the daily mistreatment of our black brothers and sisters – an evil with which God’s people can never collaborate or become complacent.
The problem is white America’s indifference to the fact that a separate code of law and order is applied to communities of color every single day.
The problem is not the disintegration of law and order but the historic
application of arbitrary, dehumanizing law and order at the whim of our dehumanized police force.
Here is a basic Christian principle: God’s people must always stand with the oppressed and the disadvantaged, just as we must always stand up for equality and justice. This is God’s way, and it must always be ours.
Thus, the ethics of God’s kingdom demand both pacifism and civil disobedience whenever cultures work to shape kingdom people, both black and white, into ungodly configurations.
Resistance is difficult but essential if we hope to become more like Jesus. Which means that the church cannot lazily mimic cultural mantras, whatever they may be.
Instead, God’s people are obligated to INSIST on justice and to RESIST falling in line.
